This September, we packed up and hit the road for four days across the North Island as part of the Design Experience event series. It was great getting out there and meeting industry professionals face-to-face in Tauranga, Hamilton, Auckland and Wellington with one clear message – throw us your trickiest design curveball, so we can sort it together!

We built an engineered timber structure packed with rugby balls and asked visitors to guess how many were inside. The responses ranged from 32 to 310, with the correct answer being… 98. A few sharp-eyed attendees nailed it exactly, which was impressive. We had to draw the winner of the Mystery Rugby Package valued up to $2,000 from these spot-on guesses.

Watch the video below to discover the winner!

The rugby ball guessing game was really just our conversation starter. What we were after were your real design curveballs – those complex projects where standard solutions won’t cut it. The brief seems impossible, the site constraints are challenging or the client needs something that pushes boundaries. These are exactly the kinds of problems we want to solve.

The conversations were fantastic. We heard about genuinely complex projects and discussed how engineered timber in general and glulaminated timber in particular could provide the solutions architects and designers have been looking for. Whether it’s managing difficult structural requirements, meeting sustainability targets or creating something that performs as well as it looks, we’re equipped to handle it. Discover how we work here.

The Design Experience reinforced something we already knew, that the New Zealand design community has no shortage of ambition and creativity, and we’re certainly ready to catch whatever curveballs come our way.

And the winner is…